Work and whisky comprised the cycle of life for many loggers on the coast of British Columbia in the first decade of the twentieth century. Following is one of my early magazine pieces, published in the magazine section of the Vancouver Sun, May 5, 1951. The year was 1906. “As you walk down the […]
Category: Alcohol
Teetotallers curb booze
Booze 1829 — 1920 From my book, About Canada, Toronto, Civil Sector Press, 2012. Curbed by a holy war waged by temperance advocates and teetotalers, Canada’s nineteenth century booze pandemic peaked in the 1820 and 1830s. Hundreds of temperance societies sprang up within a few years. They were led mostly by Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians […]
The drinkers’ social custom
Booze 1829 — 1920 People don’t drink because they like the stuff, but simply because it’s the accepted thing to do, argued the Winnipeg Times on April 15, 1879. Physicians say that nearly two-thirds of their male patients suffer in some way or other from alcoholic poison. No close observer will be inclined to doubt […]
The Mounties’ pain killer
Booze 1829 — 1920 John A. Macdonald in 1881 on reports of alcoholism in the Royal North West Mounted Police, as cited in the Winnipeg Free Press, July, 5, 1904. As regards the habits of the men, I think, on the whole, they are in a very fair state, but there is still a good […]
Drunk Macdonald or reporter?
Booze 1829 — 1920 Newspapers still provided the only published reports of debates in the House of Commons when the Toronto Globe opposed a proposed Hansard, in which the words of members of Parliament would be published after officially recorded in shorthand by Parliamentary reporters. The Globe argued that politicians would be too inclined to […]
House goes up, whisky goes down
Booze 1829 — 1920 William Thomson was unlike the troop of well-to-do, leisure class Britons who toured Canada in the early nineteenth century to write books about what they saw. A textile worker from the Aberdeen area of Scotland, Thomson supported himself during a three-year tour of the United States and Canada by working at […]
When children drank whisky at breakfast
Booze 1829 — 1920 From my book, About Canada, Toronto, Civil Sector Press, 2012. For more than a century-and-a-half, Europeans had been killing North America’s Indians by giving them firewater—whisky, brandy, rum, port, sherry—in exchange for furs. Now, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Canada’s pioneer settlers were killing themselves with their […]